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16 November 2005: Along with the June 2005 issue of Haiku Canada Newsletter and Montague Mann's Smog and another mini-broadside, LeRoy Gorman sent me a copy of his own 8-page pleatance (as I ad hoc it), landuage. If you count its title, and I do, it contains twenty pwoermds. It's to be commended for being thematically cohesive: all the words have to do with "landscrapes." I find it both brilliant and bothersome--brilliant because of triumphs like "marshush," "rainforust" and "riverb"; bothersome because (and it would seem that I'm on a mission) not as much is done with the discoveries as I feel could be. "Marshush," for instance, beautifully captures the silence of marshes semantically--and the impedingly bogginess of marshes auditorily, via the pronunciation of "marshush." A wonderful pwoermd. But think how effective it might be as the climax of a full-scale lyric! I definitely recognize the power of a single word like "lighght" or "marshush" on a page by itself. The trouble is that the technique has become super-standard. "Humdrumlin," to quote from Gorman's pleatlet again.
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